The Unnamable Read Online Free

else seems often to have helped to make it more docile and tractable, assisting the
     critic in his or her vocation of giving a name to Beckett’s
Unnamable
, rather than having to be helplessly ventriloquised by it, a predicament that uncomfortably reproduces that of the narrator
     in the novel. Such criticism insinuates that the secret name of
The Unnamable
is not essentially inaccessible, but rather withheld. An example of this approach is Hélène Baldwin’s
     study of religious mysticism in Beckett, which centres on the quest for what, seizing
     on a phrase from
The Unnamable
, she calls the ‘real silence’, of Beckett’s work. Baldwin reads the novel as ‘a metaphoric
     projection of the mystic way’, confidently declaring, for example, that the dim, intermittently
     lit setting of the novel is ‘undoubtedly the second Dark Night of the Soul’ (Baldwin
     1981, p. 69), while themysterious ‘master’ spoken of in the narrative is ‘undoubtedly Beckett’ (Baldwin 1981,
     p. 72). And while we’re about it, there can be ‘[n]o question but that the sealed
     jar is an analogue of the Crucifixion’ (Baldwin 1981, p. 76). In a more recent example
     of this mode of reading Gary Adelman names the unnamed subject of the text as the
     Holocaust, finding in its narrator a ‘new figure of epic grandeur for the age of Kafka
     and the death camps’ (Adelman 2004, p. 84).
    Another way of resisting the epistemological vortex of
The Unnamable
is precisely by construing the text as epistemology itself, or some other more or
     less formal philosophical exercise. This approach became popular in the 1980s, during
     which Continental philosophers such as Blanchot, Derrida and Deleuze were drawn upon
     to demonstrate that Beckett’s work was not only amenable to reading in the light of
     this philosophy, but actually was itself, reciprocally, already a kind of philosophy.
     This approach is a feature of the readings of Beckett’s trilogy offered by Leslie
     Hill (1990) and Thomas Trezise (1990) and, I fear, my own efforts (Connor 1988).
    One of the most extraordinary and percipient such readings
of The Unnamable
had appeared much earlier, but remained latent until reactivated by these philosophical
     readers of the 1980s. It came from the French critic and philosopher Maurice Blanchot,
     who had written to Jerome Lindon of Éditions de Minuit in May 1953, asking him for
     advance proofs of
L’Innommable
, on which he was planning to write an essay. The essay appeared in the October 1953
     issue of the
Nouvelle Revue
Française
under the title ‘Où maintenant? Qui maintenant?’ (Blanchot 1953). Blanchot saw
The Unnamable
as the work in which Beckett attained the quick or essence of writing, which for
     Blanchot was something impersonal, indifferent. In order to reach this position, Blanchot
     wrote, it is necessary for Beckett first to adopt and then to abandon the reassuring
     masks or subterfuges of plot, character or person. The rudiments of these still survive
     and reassure us in
Molloy
and
Malone Dies
. But in
The Unnamable
, Blanchot observes: ‘There is no longer anyquestion of characters under the reassuring protection of a personal name, no longer
     any question of a narrative’ (Blanchot 2000, p. 96). More than this, we are even denied
     the last resort of stabilising
The Unnamable
around the inviolable first person of Samuel Beckett, ‘where everything that happens
     happens with the guarantee of a consciousness, in a world that spares us the worst
     degradation, that of losing the power to say
I
’ (Blanchot 2000, p. 96). Rather, Blanchot insists,
The Unnamable
gets to the heart of things by pressing through, beyond or behind the first person,
     to the anonymous, tormented space of writing itself, which animates all literature,
     but is rarely, if ever, able to be grasped directly within the text. Perhaps this
     means that even the idea of
The Unnamable
as a single, bounded work is dissolved:
    Perhaps we